Does Anybody Really Know?

A last bright stretch

Nature’s greens are no longer bright. Where they can still be called green, leaves look tired and dull.  Brightness now belongs to scattered patches of fall’s early turning colors since, except for a few stretches that continue to shine, most of the goldenrod has lost its luster, Joe Pye-weed has gone from rosy lavender to dusty brown, and bracken will soon be crunchy underfoot. 

Typical dull September colors

Over the lakes, moods of sky and water are not confined to seasons, and one September morning’s sunshine and haze can look like a morning of almost any month of the year, though admittedly the lake itself may have a solid rather than a liquid surface in late winter. 

 

Grand Traverse Bay, always magical --

Even as summer does its usual reprise in September, it's time to put away summer serving dishes. Casserole season will soon be upon us.

Summer dishes, to be put away for winter --

Hurrahs Yet to Come

When someone asked me on Saturday if the season is winding down now in Northport, I mentioned next Saturday’s Leelanau UnCaged, our village’s annual all-day street fair, with three stages of dance and music, lots of food vendors, and arts and crafts booths filling the streets. It is a happy day for all and has been, from the first year, a kind of homecoming day for Northport. Colored lanterns hanging over Mill Street are but one of the first signs of the festival to come, along with medieval-looking pennant flags and posters in windows. This coming Saturday!!!

And even UnCaged will not be the last hurrah, for in October Leelanau County will have fall color and Northport will have Halloween, followed a month later by the customary beautiful tree lighting on the Saturday evening following Thanksgiving, with Santa in the village. Streets will be quieter beginning in January but not fully dormant even then. Dog Ears Books—to take one not-quite-random example—will be open four days a week, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the cold winter months.

My Own Treasure Island

In the past couple of weeks, I have had a lot of first-time customers exclaiming over the exciting selection of books they found in my shop. It’s true: I have been able to create an island of literary treasures in the 32 years I’ve been in business. Have you ever heard of a restaurant that served onion soup from a cauldron that was never allowed to go empty and never off the fire, the soup becoming richer with every passing year? Apocryphal or not, concerning the soup, it’s the way I see my bookshop.

Marbled boards announce treasure within.

The current New York Review of Books has an article on Charlotte Brontë that I read avidly. I would have been interested, anyway, but was especially so as I currently have in my shop an early copy of one of Brontë’s novels, so early that the title page attributes the work to Currer Bell, Charlotte and two of her sisters having taken on the pen names Currer Bell, Acton Bell, and Ellis Bell, in part mocking their minister father’s strait-laced curate, Arthur Bell Nichols. 

Following the deaths of the last of her siblings (their mother having died much earlier), Charlotte at last accepted a proposal of marriage from Nichols, her fourth suitor and more than likely, as she told her father, to be her last. Nichols proposed in December 1852, and after 16 months her father finally gave his consent to the marriage, which took place June 29, 1854. When Charlotte died on March 31, 1855, after less than a year of wedlock that included a difficult pregnancy, her vicar father and curate widower lived on, together, until the vicar died, at which point Arthur returned to Ireland and married one of his cousins. The revised 1871 edition of Shirley, then, appeared only after no member of the famous Brontë family remained alive. Control of his late wife’s literary estate having gone to the widower, was the author name on the title page in 1871 his choice?

A Britannica article on Charlotte Brontë gives much more information on the family, and the NYRB review of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life, by Graham Watson, tells some of the story behind the story of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1857, commissioned by Charlotte’s father, Patrick. Frances Wilson, the reviewer, tells us that Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte “lost touch” after the latter’s wedding “because Nicholls forbade his wife to write to her.” (The sin that made Gaskell an inappropriate correspondent for the Anglican curate's wife was Unitarianism.) The new husband also told his wife that she had “no time for writing [her fiction] now” and must instead tend to her “duties as a clergyman’s wife.” 

Since Charlotte died of hyperemesis gravidarum, extreme morning sickness, only nine months after their wedding, how much time or energy would she have had for those duties? And was there an emotional component to the extreme morning sickness that could also be described (Frances Wilson uses this term) as severe anorexia? Would a husband more attuned and sympathetic to her essentially creative and sensitive nature have been able to see her through the pregnancy alive, perhaps with a living child? I don’t know if Elizabeth Gaskell or Graham Watson asked these questions—Frances Wilson does not—but to me they are natural questions and beg to be asked, though we will never know the answers with certainty. No one living knows or ever can.

Charlotte Brontë has been dead for 170 years, and there is no asking her now if she entered blindly and desperately into what I speculate was a life-destroying marriage, but her writings live on, and while reading what others have to say about her is endlessly fascinating, none of it substitutes for reading Charlotte’s works themselves. 

So yes, the books are the main attraction of my business, and yet it’s important to me also that my treasure island is a physical location that can be visited in person. I have shared joys and sorrows with many families and individuals for over three decades now, have watched children grow up, and have had long-time customers become dear friends. Other businesses sell books only online, some through their own websites, others through gargantuan, impersonal, multi-dealer sites, while booksellers who have both physical and online presences cover all the bases in a way that doesn’t work for me in my one-woman shop. It's all right. I am content with my way of bookselling. It works for me. And judging from all the kind and complimentary words I’ve had from visitors this past year, it works for my customer-friends, too.

Reunion! Another generation is coming up!

For another literary chapter in my life, see this post on one of my other blogs. Also, I'll ask you now to circle a date on your calendar: Wednesday, November 12, 4 p.m. There will be a very special guest with a new book speaking then at 106 Waukazoo Street! I'll tell you more soon.... 

Meanwhile, I ask you, where will we all be five years from now? You, me, our country? No one knows! The future is even more opaque than the past! But we are here now, we have today, and how we treat each other matters. 

Friends! Priceless!

So now, speaking of friends, let's salute the memory of Leelanau County's own Dr. Kenneth Wylie, writer and teacher, lifelong student and learner and loyal friend. For years, he and the Artist were like brothers, and so I often thought of Ken as my brother-in-law. How many holiday dinners we shared! The last one was just Ken and me, at his house, in December 2024, shortly before he moved to Traverse City. Ken died this month, and he will never be replaced. (The Old Guard is passing.) I will come back to add a link to Ken's obituary when it becomes available.

Charlotte Brontë, Langston Hughes (see link a few paragraphs above), and Kenneth Wylie, two writers I never met in person and one who was a close family friend—these are the lives I choose to remember and celebrate today, in part because I believe that the lives we remember and celebrate contribute to the lives of our own souls, and so we must make those choices thoughtfully and carefully.

Kenneth C. Wylie, 1938-2025

Reading JANE EYRE in 2018 America

Wealth and family connections. Chronic mistreatment of vulnerable children. The despising of the poor by those comfortably well off. Institutional life in place of home life for the poor. Lessons in “humility” and “gratitude” to those warned to keep their “place.” -- But even in that place, flickers of kindness and opportunities to better herself. Leading to — independence, and then, in her new position, an unexpected sense of home and feelings of respect and love. -- But the veil is torn away and reality revealed, followed by the direst poverty, hunger, situational homelessness. Dangers to the homeless are real, while those with homes perceive threats from the homeless. Of course, the story does not end there....

The character of Jane Eyre herself as well as her story were something quite new to English literature. What a difference from the world of Pride and Prejudice we find in Jane Eyre! And I say this as someone who loves the novels of Jane Austen.

But in Jane Austen’s England and the class to which the Bennett daughters were born, a young woman’s only respectable end was marriage. “Independence” was a disgrace, if not a scandal, depending on how it was achieved — or, rather, “independence” was defined only by wealth, and so brought about by the right kind of marriage. Class distinctions were paramount. Servants were invisible. “Sensibility,” the name given to overwrought passion given free rein by the wrong kinds of reading in Sense and Sensibility, could lead to nothing good. 

Then along came the mystery author “Curran Bell” (Charlotte Bronte’s nom de plume), with her passionate little orphan, Jane, with her innate sense of justice. Revolutionary! I ask my women friends, whose life rings truer to yours in its essentials, that of Eliza Bennett or that of Jane Eyre?

Does the child deserve ill treatment? She is dependent on an aunt by marriage who detests her, as do the three children who are her blood first cousins. You would think that tie would mean more, but Jane’s mother was sister to the cousins’ father, so they are cousins by a female relative — and one who, moreover, married beneath her station. The brother could forgive, but his wife could not, and their children have no love for their cousin. The 14-year-old boy is particularly cruel and despicable, telling little Jane that she “ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense.” Jane’s mother’s sin had been to marry a poor curate, against her family’s wishes. Her punishment was to be disinherited by her grandfather. Jane’s parents dying of typhus (her father contracted the illness while visiting those poorer than himself, in pursuit of his calling), her uncle adopted her — and loved her — but then he also died. Family wealth is not to be shared except under the most careful legal arrangements, and the daughter of a disinherited relative by marriage has no claim on the cousins’ mother beyond the promise made to her dying husband — conveniently set aside in time, the better to suit her own feelings and purposes.

Jane’s background is given quickly in the novel’s beginning. Mr. Rochester’s character and the lively relationship he comes to value in Jane is the focus of most readers and has been mine in previous readings of the novel, but this week I come to it with a different heart, with different heavy thoughts. I see the fictional aunt’s and boy cousin’s heartlessness in the first two chapters against current stories — in 2018 — of girl children accorded lesser value than their male contemporaries. Issues of poverty and wealth add another dimension. Envy, hatred, retribution -- it's all there.

The Bennett family and the mother and daughters in Sense and Sensibility are close to adulthood and their “poverty” relative only to the wealth of antecedent generations. Little Jane Eyre, on the other hand, despised by her own relatives, is daily schooled in “humility,” first in the home of those relatives and afterward in the charity school to which she is sent. She succeeds academically, however, conquers her temper, and after six years as a student is promoted to teaching in the same school. It is independence of a sort, but the scope of the school world does not satisfy her. She wants to see more, to experience more — and, still determinedly independent, she seeks and finds a position as governess. 

When one of Jane Austen’s characters prepares to go out as governess, she is an object of pity to friends and to the author. For Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the position of governess is an achievement — not failure but success. In Pride and Prejudice, only the housekeeper, “Hill,” is given a name. In Mrs. Reed’s house, we know Bessie and and Abbott and Robert; in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield, even the footman, Sam, is named. Is it a difference in the times or in the eye of an author who sees beyond social conventions? Perhaps something of both. 

Jane Eyre was feared by many in its time. The novel exposed a young woman’s capacity for passion and urged moral equality, not only among various social classes but also between men and women. If Jane is elevated late in the novel by an unexpected inheritance, so is Mr. Rochester brought low by injuries sustained in the fire that destroys Thornfield. Their respective changes in fortune do not make the man the woman’s inferior, however; what is brought about is an equality of fortune to align with the moral equality Jane had claimed from the start — and which Edward Rochester could not help acknowledging and respecting, even at his most desperate.

What if, what if??? we may ask, imagining other paths the story might have taken, but Bronte shaped her novel to the characters she conceived, and so their end is not contrived but, according to the individuals they were and the circumstances of their lives, inevitable. Society is left as it was, except that readers of Jane Eyre have been given a glimpse of different values and possibilities. 

Paul Krugman had an interesting opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s part of what he wrote in refutation of the notion that only blue color workers feel “economic anxiety” and are responsible for the current political climate:

…It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety. 

You might think this is impossible, that having a good job and a comfortable life would inoculate someone against envy and hatred. That is, you might think that if you knew nothing of human nature and the world. 

I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize. 

What is happening in our country today, he says (and I agree) is “not about populism." The power behind it, the money and influence behind it, come from the privileged who don’t want others to share their good fortune.

What has become of Bronte’s vision? Of respect for honest work, of truth spoken across classes, of moral equality between men and women, of the “American dream” for all Americans? What has become of the American dream vision it used to seem most of us shared for our country?

“Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. … At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence … I used to rush into strange dreams at night….  By nine o’clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.” - Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

I'm not even separated from my true love, and still it takes that second cup of coffee every morning for me to shake the nightmares of these times.